An Ethereum startup referred to as Prodeum disappeared from the net on Sunday after elevating a grand whole of $11 USD from buyers in a crowdsale. Shortly after the web site disappeared, a message appeared on its homepage: “penis.”

Prodeum’s web site now redirects guests to the Twitter account of a cryptocurrency dealer (they didn’t instantly reply to our request for remark), and its Twitter account has been deactivated.

Prodeum is not less than the second Ethereum startup to tug up stakes after elevating cash from folks in occasions referred to as Initial Coin Offerings, or ICOs, during which a startup funds their enterprise by taking cryptocurrency from folks in change for digital tokens. Some ICOs have managed to lift tens of millions of , and the final startup to fade after conducting an ICO—Confido, which disappeared from the web in late 2017—made off with roughly $374,000. (A message later appeared on Confido’s web site stating that it will purchase again buyers’ tokens, however it’s unclear if that occurred.)

Prodeum, by comparability, solely appears to have raised $11 based mostly on the Ethereum tackle that was marketed on Prodeum’s web site as being the ICO tackle. (Update: After this article was revealed the contents of the ICO pockets have been despatched to a different pockets. That pockets incorporates roughly $100, with the opposite funds all coming from a single pockets that predates the Prodeum ICO and incorporates 46 cents.)

Prodeum’s pitch, in accordance with a cached model of its webpage, was to trace greens in a provide chain utilizing digital addresses on a blockchain—a decentralized ledger on the coronary heart of Ethereum and different cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin.

The Prodeum web site, for what it’s price, is flashy and general very effectively completed. To throw off the suspicious, in case you click on a photograph of any of Prodeum’s workers, you’re taken to that individual’s related LinkedIn profile. It additionally seems, as Buzzfeed journalist Ryan Mac famous on Twitter, that the startup was paying folks on Fiverr to advertise the ICO by writing “Prodeum” on their our bodies. Still, it doesn’t appear to be all of the promotion was sufficient to make Prodeum’s crowdsale worthwhile.

There’s one a part of the continuing Prodeum saga that doesn’t appear to suit wherever neatly, although. It’s penis. What might it imply? It doesn’t have a goading high quality—no “Ha ha we received you” vibe—in all probability as a result of they solely made sufficient to purchase two Big Mac meals. It might feasibly be a easy troll, the equal of scrawling a dick in Sharpie throughout a toilet wall. But Prodeum’s web site was elaborate sufficient to recommend actual care and energy on the a part of the perpetrators.

To me, the small “penis” that was left on Prodeum’s web site as an alternative silently screams with nihilism. Because, I imply, what else is there to say?

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UPDATE: This article was up to date when the funds from the digital pockets related to the Prodeum ICO have been moved into one other pockets.